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You are here: Home / Absent Friends / RIP / RIP, Helen Thomas

Reader Interactions

42Comments

  1. 1.

    Yatsuno

    She was very much a journalist as her milieu was dying around her. She will be remembered fondly for her tough questions as well as her more outrageous statements. I just hope her chair is left empty in memoriam.

  5. 5.

    Violet

    I’m sorry she left her job on such a poor note. RIP, Helen. Thanks for being such a trailblazer.

  7. 7.

    ItAintEazy

    Of course she’s not a true journalist because she said something about a partition plan the Arabs never consented to.

  8. 8.

    Dee Loralei

    I always admired the crap out of her, especially during the Bush years when she seemed to be the only reporter in the White House asking any real questions. I hated the fact that her career ended on such a bad note. What a trailblazer and one hell of a reporter. RIP Helen.

  9. 9.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    RIP, Helen Thomas. Even in your current condition you’re still a better journalist than 99% of the blow dried donkeys who currently plague the profession.

  11. 11.

    srv

    RIP. I want to make a horror/slasher movie where she and Molly Ivans come back as a zombies, and hunt down and terrorize ex-Presidents and staffers.

  14. 14.

    Jose Arcadio Buendía

    How can you laud someone who supports ethnic cleansing?

    Edit: I hope they bury her in Lebanon, since according to her rules everyone should “go back” where they came from.

  16. 16.

    Jose Arcadio Buendía

    @Dee Loralei: You mean on a revealed-as-a-loathesome-antisemite note? Yeah. What a shame. Maybe it would have been better if she just said all of those things in private so we could go on liking her just because she asked W one tough question.

  18. 18.

    SiubhanDuinne

    RIP, Helen Thomas. Many decades ago, I served as President of the Tampa chapter of what became Women in Communications, and the keynote speaker at our annual awards luncheon was Helen Thomas. She was a wonderful, inspiring, funny speaker. When she related her (undoubtedly well-worn) anecdotes about JFK, LBJ, and then-president RMN, you had the feeling that she was including you in some very special high-level gossip and journalistic inside information. It was a great event, and she gave every sign of having a terrific time.

    On September 10, 2001, she addressed the Southern Governors’ Association in a similar vein. I had a chance to chat with her for a few minutes and mentioned the Tampa event of a quarter-century earlier. I’m sure she didn’t remember me, and had no reason to, but she remembered being in Tampa and addressing our group at the height of Watergate.

    Good lady, good journalist. Opinionated as fuck, but she sure knew how to hold politicians’ feet to the fire. And when it came time for her own feet to warm up, she resigned promptly, unequivocally, and with dignity.

  21. 21.

    NickT

    @efgoldman:

    Anyway, it’s much too hot and humid for the flame war to be truly energetic or entertaining. Which, of course, proves that climate change ain’t happening, by the Second Law of Derp.

  22. 22.

    Lavocat

    I loved how she schooled Bush the Lesser back in the day.

    FUCK YEAH!

    Helen, you fought the good fight and made all of us progressives proud.

    You practiced journalism when it was in its glory days.

    Thank you, Mrs. Thomas.

  23. 23.

    ? Martin

    She gave my commencement address. A few graduating students got to be her guide for the day (take her on tours, have lunch with her and the college President, stuff like that), and since I was one of the two student reps to the faculty committee, I got chosen. We talked a lot about what it was like covering previous presidents. Bush Sr. was in office, and none of use were particularly interested in that. Even the recent Gulf War wasn’t of interest – but the Berlin Wall had just come down and the Soviet Union was teetering, so we were much more interested in what it was like covering the WH during the Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, etc. She was really quite funny and a very good storyteller. There were a lot of observations of how much more formal and detached covering the president became after Nixon.

    RIP, Helen.

  25. 25.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    @efgoldman:

    Thanks for your insight. My comment was about Buendia’s mischaracterizing Helen Thomas – not about the Israelis and the Palestinians.

  28. 28.

    MikeBoyScout

    I doubt we’ll see the likes of her in the White House press room ever again

    Fondly remember Helen holding Saint Ronnie accountable. Those were the days.

  29. 29.

    MikeBoyScout

    I doubt we’ll see the likes of her in the White House press room ever again.

    Fondly remember Helen holding Saint Ronnie accountable. Those were the days.

  31. 31.

    Corner Stone

    @Gator90:

    Perhaps it isn’t fair to judge a long and mostly productive life by one foul remark. But I do.

    Meh. I tend to not lionize people because we’re all imperfect creatures. She got the shaft for some bullshit. And you and that other jerkoff can both go fuck yourselves if you don’t like it.

  32. 32.

    aimai

    Helen Thomas was a very big deal to women as a journalist, and to journalists as a woman and she broke a lot of barriers for women who came after her. She was tough and insightful as a journalist and she didn’t back down when the rest of the so-called journalists covering the White House were cowereing because of the glamor and the imaginary importance of their position as interlocutors for the Bush White House. This other stuff is just ridiculous. In a long life everyone–everyone–is going to say something to piss off one group they are covering or another. Her work stands for itself, and it stands very high, notwithstanding any personal failings or lapses in judgement with respect to any single political debate.

  33. 33.

    Stephen Brophy

    My Facebook post: So Helen Thomas has died. If she hadn’t had a momentary lapse of judgement 3 years ago, at the age of 89, she might very well still have been working. It’s sad that that episode gave a few much younger idiots, who wouldn’t have been worthy of her spit if she had deigned to aim it at them, an opportunity to disrespect her. But she will stand as a monument to what journalism once was long after they have permanently sunk into insignificance. RIP.

  34. 34.

    fuckwit

    The problem Helen Thomas had with her remark is that she missed the core of the I/P problem itself:

    Two wrongs don’t make a right.

    She appears to have missed that point, or she’d have realized that THREE wrongs wouldn’t make a right either.

  35. 35.

    Corner Stone

    Glad to see the Ari Fleischer’s of BJ make themselves heard. Hope you’re appreciative of the association:

    “She should lose her job over this,” Fleischer said in an email. “As someone who is Jewish, and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling.”

    “She is advocating religious cleansing. How can Hearst stand by her? If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs.”

  36. 36.

    eemom

    Momentary lapse of judgment?

    On December 2, 2010, shortly before a speech for the eighth annual “Images and Perceptions of Arab Americans” conference at the Byblos Banquet Center on Chase, Thomas told reporters that she still stood by the comments she had made to Nesenoff. Referring to her resignation, she said “I paid a price, but it’s worth it to speak the truth.” During the speech, Thomas said: “Congress, the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street are owned by Zionists. No question, in my opinion.” Thomas defended her comments on December 7, telling Scott Spears of Marion, Ohio AM radio station WMRN, “I just think that people should be enlightened as to who is in charge of the opinion in this country.”

    In March 2011, Thomas did an interview with David Hochman, a reporter for Playboy magazine. . . . Later in the interview, when asked by Hochman if she stood by her December 2010 accusations that Zionists own the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street, Thomas answered that she did stand by those remarks. When confronted with the fact that Jews constitute a small percentage of the total population, Thomas told Hochman: “I know where you’re leading with this. You know damn well the power [Jews] have…It’s real power when you own the White House, when you own these other places in terms of your political persuasion. Of course they have power. You don’t deny that. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” Hochman said that he was Jewish.

  37. 37.

    Elizabelle

    Helen Thomas was a brilliant and fearless journalist, who was very opinionated in private.

    I was sorry to see her brought down at age 89 by a pack of jackals, Ari Fleischer among them. Her comments were out of bounds, unquestionably, but it was pathetic to watch the piling on. She hit one of the third rails, apparently, and cowards helped take her out.

    She was more courageous than just about any journalist that followed her. We have too many careerists who would work for Fox News, if it came to that, to stay in the loop. Stenographers, and overly paid and comfortable ones at that.

    Helen’s quitting her longtime home, UPI, the day that Reverend Moon took control was a fine moment.

    Ironic to say about Helen “history will be kind” to her, since I think that is a line also offered in comfort to Richard Nixon.

    92’s a good run, especially if you were still working at 89 at a profession you loved, but I am sad at Helen Thomas’s passing.

  38. 38.

    Stephen Brophy

    @eemom: Her lapse of judgement was not in what she thought; it was when/where/how she expressed it. I’m talking about judgement in the professional rather than moral sense here. If you are one of those who is so intent to stomp all over her grave to make some point that you will refer to one of the most contested entries in Wikipedia this afternoon to cherry pick a couple of items from her entire biography – if you choose that behavior, I think your behavior is ugly and detestable. A woman has died who opened up a profession to many other women – give your pet peeves a rest until she is buried.

  39. 39.

    eemom

    @Stephen Brophy:

    I wasn’t stomping on shit, asshole. Those are direct quotes of ugly anti-Semitic comments, and they belie your statement above that the incident that led to her resignation was a momentary lapse in judgment. That’s the beginning and end of what I said.

    Is there any “contest” that she actually said those things? If not, tell us more about how anti-Semitism is a “pet peeve” in your book.

    FTR, I don’t actually give a shit one way or the other. When I heard of her death today, I couldn’t remember exactly what it was she said that led to her resignation, so I went to Wiki to look it up…..and I was kind of shocked to learn of those follow up comments.

    Also too, if canonizing the recently deceased is your thing, you came to the wrong place.

  41. 41.

    Stephen Brophy

    @eemom: I see you are still demonstrating your amazing capacity to refuse to hear what someone says to you. And your evidence for real anti-semitism is mighty thin if those 2 quotes are all you’ve got. At least to those of us who don’t equate that term to less than abject agreement with whatever the Israeli gov’t (or maybe just the right wing ones) does.

  42. 42.

    Paul in KY

    Wonderful lady. Born in Kentucky. Wished many more reporters did it like her.

    RIP, Helen.

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